About the performance:I’m Not Sure How To Tell You is a performance of excerpts (spoken word/photography) from The Archive of K.Kalpana an ongoing archival project by Rashmi Munikempanna. The archive includes photography, poetry, sound, video and digital art that documents a year in the life of K.Kalpana as she explores what it means to be diagnosed with a mental illness.The archive is constructed as a way of politicising illness by addressing structural causes while dismantling the disciplining by the psychiatric hospital of the gendered queer body marked by class and caste. It is constructed as being in conversation with the Mental Healthcare Act 2017. The archive can be accessed here: https://kkalpana.home.blog/

The word ‘Dalit’ is not encircled by the caste system. Is that why? It seems so.

Let’s not forget that in India, people adopted the word ‘Hindu’ –
even though it was given by outsiders – so that the caste system could
work as a religion. Whatever objections we may have to that, we still
have to understand it as the generosity of India’s spirit.

Now the fact that India’s hundreds of taḷa (marginalised) communities – those who are cast aside, broken; who don’t accept the four-fold varna system; the fragmented and the scattered – are calling themselves ‘Dalit’ has made the Central government see red.

Why is the Central government so resentful? I don’t understand this.
The word ‘Dalit’ is not encircled by the caste system. Is that why? It
seems so.

I’m going to say a few
words based on our community’s understanding – if a murderer comes to kill you
openly, the possibility of escaping is high. It can even perhaps be fought
against. But if the same killer is in disguise, it would be difficult to get
away.

Now we are
experiencing a similar situation. The emergency that Indira Gandhi had brought
into force was straightforward. It was visible. So we could protest it. We
could organise against it. What we have now is also an emergency. It’s just not
being called by that name. This is an emergency in disguise. This could be
called the ‘Cow-faced Tiger Emergency’. The symptoms of this ‘Cow-faced Tiger
Emergency’ is being seen throughout the country today.